Diablo 3 Reaper Of Souls Hotfixes Improve Adventure Mode Loot

Blizzard has deployed a series of hotfixes for Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. These changes are designed to make the expansion pack's Adventure Mode more rewarding to players.

Adventure Mode offers players randomized quests ("Bounties") and dungeons ("Nephalem Rifts") to provide them with new challenges and loot after they've finished the campaign. The development team considered the mode the main selling point for Reaper of Souls. However, they found that many players weren't using this feature enough.

"Rifts have always been intended to be the most efficient play method in the game, currently they arenít for a number of reasons," designer Travis Day said on the Battle.net forums.
"Part of this has to do with the high level of efficiency in farming that players find doing things like farming Manglemaw, Razorclaw and any other number of unique monsters."

"Another contributing element is that farming chests without having to actually fight monsters is far more effective than actually fighting the monsters. It is very important to us that chests are exciting to find and feel rewarding but presently they are far too common and reliable to farm in certain areas of the game."

Today's hotfixes cause unique monsters to drop less items. That nerf won't include treasure goblins or rift bosses, though. Players will also find fewer chests throughout the game.

Blizzard has also made Rifts more rewarding. The bonus legendary drop rate in these dungeons has been boosted from 25% to 100%. This means your chance to find a legendary in Rifts is now double your chance of finding one outside a Rift.

Kadala, an NPC for Adventure Mode, has been changed by the hotfixes as well. Players can buy unidentified items from her in exchange for Blood Shards earned through the mode. Blizzard felt that she wasn't useful enough, though. Her chance to give out Legendaries has been increased.

"While we donít want players to simply pick and choose from a list of items at an excessively high cost, we do want you to have an answer to the question 'How do I upgrade my boots?' Kadala is meant to be that answer, she is meant to give you some direct control over the types of items you find. Since we are increasing the overall reward structure of the game she is also going to be increasing but by a larger amount than the rest of the changes since she didn't feel rewarding enough to us."

Blizzard released Patch 2.0.4 for the game earlier in the week. This update provided portraits for players who hit high levels in Paragon progression. Pets are now more durable and their damage scales better. The full list of changes can be found at Diablo 3's website. There's no mention of changes to the Malthael boss fight, though, which players have been beating on max difficulty level using unorthodoxtactics.